The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the invention. However, it should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge as at the priority date of the application.
A vehicle tyre (or tire) is a generally a circular ring shaped covering manufactured from rubber and reinforcing steel which is fitted over the outer circumference of a vehicle wheel. Most vehicle tyres since at least the 1960s have been made from a composite material that includes rubber reinforced with cords of polyester, steel, and/or other textile materials. This composite material has varying configurations in different functional sections of the tyre in order to provide different properties of strength, resilience and shape in accordance with the function of that section. A tyre can therefore generally be said to include three distinct compositional sections:                The crown, located generally around the outer perimeter of the tyre formed from a thick section of rubber that includes rigid steel belts for reinforcement to give high mileage and performance. The crown includes an outer surface having various designs of jagged shaped grooves in it, known as the tread.        The sidewalls are the radial sections of the tyre between the crown and the inner circular edges of the tyre contacting the wheel rim. The sidewalls include a number of radial reinforcing cords that add to the resilience of the sidewall.        The bead located at the inner rim of the tyre and is reinforced with a number of concentric circumferential reinforcing steel wires.        
Even with reinforcement, vehicle tyres have a limited life and will eventually have to be replaced. Many such used tyres are subsequently processed and recycled in order to reuse the rubber and steel constituents of the tyre. As the tyre structure has different composition in each section, it is desirable to separate the tyre into these different sections in order to process the different sections separately. A number of tyre recycling processes are known to the applicant that separate the tyre into at least two separate compositional sections. In several prior processes known to the applicant, the recycling process includes a cutting process that separates the sidewalls of the tyre from the crown of the tyre. A number of processes also longitudinally cut each of the sidewall section and crown section into two or more symmetrical parts using various cutting devices such as circular saws, cutting blades or the like.
However, most prior tyre segmenting processes tend to be complicated, using a number of interrupted processes to separate the various sections of the tyre. Some prior tyre segmenting processes also require stoppages between each step in order to load and unload the tyre from the segmenting device and/or during the cutting process in order to utilise different cutting devices to divide the tyre in to the various compositional sections.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an alternative tyre segmenting device that was generally simpler than prior tyre segmenting devices. Furthermore, it would be preferable for this device to include a positioning device that would aid in aligning and positioning a tyre in the cutting device in order to provide more continuous and preferably faster processing of the tyre.